Judea Pearl speaks out
Great opinion piece today by Judea Pearl who lost his son Daniel to Islamist extremists six years ago this week. Today he excoriates the media in the Wall Street Journal, The Daniel Pearl Standard;
One of the things that saddens me most is that the press and media have had an active, perhaps even major role in fermenting hate and inhumanity. It was not religious fanaticism alone.
This was first brought to my attention by the Pakistani Consul General who came to offer condolences at our home in California. When we spoke about the anti-Semitic element in Danny’s murder she said: “What can you expect of these people who never saw a Jew in their lives and who have been exposed, day and night, to televised images of Israeli soldiers targeting and killing Palestinian children.”
At the time, it was not clear whether she was trying to exonerate Pakistan from responsibility for Danny’s murder, or to pass on the responsibility to European and Arab media for their persistent de-humanization of Jews, Americans and Israelis. The answer was unveiled in 2004, when a friend told me that photos of Muhammad Al Dura were used as background in the video tape of Danny’s murder.
Al Dura, readers may recall, is the 12-year-old Palestinian boy who allegedly died from Israeli bullets in Gaza in September of 2001. As we now know, the whole scene is very likely to have been a fraud, choreographed by stringers and cameramen of France 2, the official news channel of France. France 2 aired the tape repeatedly and distributed it all over the world to anyone who needed an excuse to ratchet up anger or violence, among them Danny’s killers.
The Pakistani Consul was right. The media cannot be totally exonerated from responsibility for Daniel’s murder, as well as for the “tsunami of hate” that has swept the world and continues to rise.
We can toss in a few hundred other examples of that, too. Starting with “flushed Koran” story, the hundreds of staged photos that AP and Reuters have unashamedly posted around the world, the intentional exclusion of the terms “Arabic” or “Islamic” when describing criminal acts. Purposely avoiding the use of the word “terrorist” and replacing it with the more benign “militant” unwilling to make the distinction betweeen criminal acts and acts of liberation.
Mr. Pearl mentions these, too;
The press and media has indeed become more polarized and agenda-driven. Journalists today are pressured to serve the ideologies of those who pay their salaries or those who supply them with sources of information. CNN’s admission, in 2003, that it concealed information about the Iraqi regime in order to keep its office in Baghdad is a perfect example of this pressure. In the recent Gaza chaos, Western news agencies have willingly reported Hamas propaganda stunts as truth.
Mr. Pearl recommends we use The Daniel Pearl Standard of selecting our media;
…to distinguish true from false journalism, just choose any newspaper or TV channel and ask yourself when was the last time it ran a picture of a child, a grandmother or any empathy-evoking scene from the “other side” of a conflict.
Of course, if everyone used that standard, there’d be no more media.
Thanks to Bloodthirsty Liberal who pointed out that Judea Pearl is Daniel Pearl’s father and not his wife, saving me some measure of embarrassment..
